The Knowledge Tax

Allow me to lead with my conclusion: Our current government is collecting information at unprecedented levels. At the same time, they are weakening the value of our own information, preventing us from creating new knowledge, and providing disincentives to increasing our own knowledge.

The short story I'm using as a launching point is not overly dramatic, and is easy to write off as being about one individual. The event, however, disturbed me quite a bit at the time, and just keeps getting worse.

On 9/11, before a definitive explanation had been given on the news, my mother was on-line looking for information about Osama bin-Laden. She had always been a fairly curious individual, and unlike many Americans, she had been worried about Islamic terrorism for some time.

Like many others, however, she had been growing more and more conservative in her religious outlook, leading to a greater and greater affinity for conservative politicians.

When she realized that the attacks actually were the result of Islamic terrorism, she became concerned that she had placed herself under suspicion by using the internet to search for information on Islamic terrorists.

Unlike many people, I did not find this to be a totally paranoid fear, although I assured her that nothing she had searched for or found was in any way incriminating. What surprised me most, however, is that she blamed herself for foolishly putting herself under suspicion. It was her belief that the government should be looking for Americans with an unhealthy interest in terrorism, should be monitoring the internet, and should investigate anyone spending too much time on the wrong websites.

Please let this sink in. My mother felt that seeking information about who attacked America and why was tantamount to probable cause.

So how does my mother, still a much more intellectually curious person than the president she supports, get her information concerning world events? Cable news and talk radio.

There seems to be a conservative belief that unlike money, the government knows how to use information better than individuals do, so the government should have all of the information it wants. Furthermore, facts are merely another type of intellectual property, which can only belong to one entity at a time. The government needs the facts more than you do, so you can't have them. True, some facts currently belong to neither the government nor individuals as of yet, but the government has a prior claim upon all hidden facts, a fact withholding so to speak.

And this is all well and good. Many Americans feel guilty that they know about the government's collection of private information, because they feel that this knowledge is the government's private information, which is something that the government, but not a citizen, is entitled to have.

Wanting to know about secret government programs is exactly the type of potentially criminal desire that the government should be collecting information on, so opposing the programs only validate them.

Other than vomit or cry, what is their to do? Well, I hereby donate two cents to the NSA, and anybody else reading this:

I believe that people's minds and their contents are their own, and they should be able to use them as they see fit. That's why I'm suggesting that the Bush Administration send back the information they've collected on the hard working middle class. Then, they should cut the information they're collecting by half, and make the current limits on the knowledge tax, such as FISA, permanent.

It's a start.